My Near-Death Experience

Life flashes before the author’s eyes

They say that your whole life flashes before your eyes when you’re about to die, and I’m here to tell you that it’s true. A few months ago, I fell off a thousand-plus-foot-high sheer granite face that had earned a 5.14d rating on the Yosemite Decimal System index—meaning that it is one of the most difficult climbs known to man. Whether this classification is accurate or not I have no idea, as my fall happened when I was just going for a really long walk. All I remember is wondering when the hiking trail I was on would start to feature a less strenuous, “downhill” grade. I was still puzzling over this during my first .025 seconds of unhindered free fall.

You notice the oddest little things when you’re nine hundred and fifty feet above the ground, having just stepped off the business side of a man-killing mountain. Things like:

—Lichen.

—The almost laughable ineffectiveness of “wind resistance” in the real world, despite its being such a bugaboo for designers of cars and gay-looking competitive bicycle clothes.

—“Does that ant realize he’s eight hundred and fifty feet off the ground, or does he think that he’s on the ground and he’s wondering why I’m falling sideways?”

Halfway through that last thought, I was jolted out of my ruminations by a tree branch slapping me in the face. Which, honestly, I could have done without. Very shortly thereafter, I remember falling past an actual mountain climber—his belt heavy with pitons or spitons or whatever they’re called—who watched me pass and exclaimed, “What the f—?”

At this point, I realized that I was about to die, and that’s when my whole life flashed before my eyes. It seemed to go chronologically, but super-sped up.

I saw my first dog, Steven, when he was just a puppy. He was also falling through the air at a hundred and thirty-five miles per hour next to me, which seemed an unnecessarily cruel trick of the mind, considering that Steven had died a peaceful death of barking-induced throat cancer back around the time that my stepdad got wrongfully arrested for dog-kicking.

Then I saw my first girlfriend, and then my first girlfriend’s mother (who was even hotter than the girlfriend). Then my first car. This was odd, considering that I’ve never actually owned a car—but I did distinctly see an ’89 Toyota Corolla, which, now that I think about it, must have been my first rental, that weekend when I flew to Phoenix for a college friend’s ill-advised wedding.

Between five hundred and four hundred and fifty feet above the ground, I saw the entirety of the movie “Arthur 2: On the Rocks,” and had time to note, wistfully, that it was much funnier than I had remembered.

Around four hundred feet or so, I was struck by another metaphysical conundrum: What kind of person climbs four hundred feet up a sheer granite face just to write “You suck! Bababooey!” on an otherwise pristine boulder?

In the next .00075 seconds of free fall, I saw the rest of my life flash before my eyes. Everything up to and including the moment when I thought, Hey, if I turn around and retrace my steps right now it’ll all be downhill from here, and I can—oops! What the—

At this point, I realized that it was time to calm what they call the “monkey mind,” a concept I read about once in an in-flight-magazine article about meditation, and how it can help prevent the “non-useful” feelings that lead to incidents of air rage. I needed to make something positive of this experience. For instance, I could think up advice for the living from one who is about to die and is watching his life flash before his eyes. Here’s what I came up with:

1. There are lots of boring parts in even the most interesting life. So get in the habit of sleeping with the TV on, so that eventually—when you have to watch your whole life flash before your eyes—you’ll have something to look at during those long, dull hours when you’re doing nothing but lying in bed asleep.

2. Encourage every person who shares your bed to sleep nude, on top of the covers. You’ll never get tired of looking at your exes in the nude. Trust me.

3. Don’t go to see bad movies that you know are going to be bad just to laugh at them. They’re never as funny the second time around, when you’re falling through the air and your friends aren’t around to laugh along with you.

4. Give a thought to switching up your bathroom technique every now and then. When everything is sped up enough, life can start to seem like one long toilet-sit, periodically interrupted by tentative journeys out of the bathroom, which inevitably end in a return to the bathroom.

Around this point—a hundred feet above the ground—I realized that my death was imminent. I tried to rerun my favorite parts of my life one last time, but all that flashed before my eyes was everything that had happened during my last nine hundred feet of free-falling.

Imagine my surprise when my fall was broken by a band of nature enthusiasts, who were gathered around a patch of lichen, fighting over who’d get to look at it next through the magnifying glass. I can’t even begin to imagine how fast each of their lives must have flashed before their eyes. (Except for the one who survived for a while and was medevaced to a treatment facility, where he expired; he had a good two hours to linger over everything that had flashed before his eyes.)

As for me, I didn’t come out of this experience unscathed. I am in one of those full-body casts which you usually see only in comedies that involve skiing, and I’m writing this with my tongue—which probably explains why my prose has been so erotically charged. I apologize for that.

A near-death experience makes you realize just how short life is. As soon as I can get hold of a remote control that doesn’t taste like other people’s hands, the first thing I’m going to do is reprogram my TiVo’s Season Pass and WishList settings, to make sure that I don’t waste another precious moment watching a Discovery Channel special about people building a megabridge in Singapore or whatever. ♦

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